Art for over-18s

It's not an exhibition, it's a gig: the not so young turks of British art all huddled behind their elective leader and main media manipulator, Damien Hirst, have stormed the portals of the stuffy magnificence of London's Royal Academy with their bright, brash and occasionally brilliant works of art.

Very much a greatest hits of the last 10 years of controversial endeavour, the 42 artists assembled here in the ironically-titled Sensation collection seem, in these surroundings, to be more exhibitionists than exhibitors.

Their work (all from Charles Saatchi's collection), which ranges in media from painting, sculpture and video to photography and ready-made objects, is as conceptual as it comes and deals with contemporary problems and obsessions from a youthful perspective ("youthful" being a very relative term in Royal Academy terms). Shot through with all manner of facetious seriousness and pitch-black humour, the works serve as metaphors for our time: count them in and count them out - love and sex, food and fashion, violence and child abuse, ephemeral pop and time-honoured classicism. And not a landscape in sight.

With its self-conscious "over-18" rating, Sensation was true to its name from the first day of its three-month residency. Three members of the Royal Academy resigned in protest over the very staging of the exhibition; the agitated and distressed leader writers of the middle-brow tabloids (Daily Express and Mail) dusted off their "putting a dead cow in a tank of formaldehyde is not art - bring back Constable" editorials; and worse still, at a last minute meeting some RA elders decided to remove one of the more controversial exhibits but were informed it must stay because it had already been published in the catalogue.

The exhibit in question, Myra by Marcus Harvey, was a giant re-working of the police custody photograph of Moors murderer Myra Hindley. According to the artist, he decided to re-work the Hindley image using the cast of a child's hand to question the iconic status given to the image and its attendant fascination and repulsion by the media and public alike - in short, to examine how a set of features has ceased to portray a face and become an image of evil.

The people who gathered to protest outside the RA, including some relatives of those murdered by Hindley and Brady, were not exactly receptive to the artist's intentions, remarking that the use of Hindley's image as part of an art exhibition was "filthy" and "disgusting".

Within hours of the exhibition opening, two people had defaced Harvey's work by throwing paint and eggs over it. Whether Myra returns to the exhibition after it has been cleaned remains the subject of considerable debate - Hindley herself has requested that it shouldn't be re-mounted.

Myra apart, there was plenty on show to disgust and outrage or exhilarate and fascinate, depending, as John Berger would have it, on your way of seeing. Turner prize winner and "punk rock artist" Damien Hirst didn't let the side down by the inclusion of his One Thousand Years work. One glass chamber contains a box of maggots that evolve into flies who gradually find their way into an adjoining chamber where they are attracted by a dead cow's head. Above the rotting head is an Insect O-Cutor and as each fly comes into contact with it, you can see the flash and hear the crackle of the fly's death.

Elsewhere, Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, an examination of stereotypes of "blackness" - it's all Afro hairstyles - comes complete with fresh elephant dung attached to the canvas. Tracey Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With is simply a portable tent on the floor; once you crawl inside you can read the names and details of everyone she's ever slept with (including a member of her family, disturbingly enough).

Somewhat more traditionally (but not much) Marc Quinn's extraordinary self-portrait, Self is a plaster cast of his head filled with nine pints of his own blood which he took from his veins over a five month period.

Jake and Dinos Chapman's Zygotic Ac- celeration features a group of child mannequins all of whom have massive genitalia growing out of different parts of their body while another work by Marcus Harvey, cleverly titled Dudley, Like What You See? Then Call Me is a series of pornographic photos culled from the pages of "Readers' Wives".

Reactions to this "controversial" wing of the exhibition have included expletive-strewn disgust; awe and admiration; much tut-tutting and demanding of a refund; intelligent, informed and very positive appraisals of the works; and two people passing out while looking at Hirst's fly and cow's head work.

What steals the show, however, are the less talked about and less noticed exhibits which include Richard Billingham's chillingly naturalistic and charmingly orthodox photographs of his family who live on a Birmingham council estate. Brutal but sympathetic, the photos were taken over a series of years and feature images of his father lying drunk next to a toilet bowel surrounded by his own vomit and his mother feeding a new-born puppy with a syringe alongside appalling images of domestic violence.

Rachel Whiteread's companion piece to her Turner Prize-winning House is a plaster cast of a room in a Victorian terraced house similar to the one she grew up in. Visible in the "negative" are all the details of the door, window, mantlepiece and skirting board of the room. Called Ghost, it's a warmly nostalgic and highly imaginative piece of work.

There's plenty of fun on offer too, from Simon Patterson's Jesus Christ In Goal which shows the line-up at the Last Supper "arranged according to the sweeper formation", to Adam Chodzko's The God Lookalike Contest - a series of photos which were sent to the artist after he advertised in a paper asking for people who thought they looked like God to send their photo to him - one of the funniest things you're ever likely to see.

Keith Coventry's White Abstract (Sir Norman Reid Explaining Modern Art To The Queen, 1979) works on a similar level, only as more of an in-joke.

Disturbing and shocking/clever and thoughtful/playful and humorous, Sensation is whatever you want it to be or whatever you go looking for in the first place. But is it that which we commonly refer to as art?

"Yes," says the leader of the pack, Damien Hirst. "The viewer should be made do a lot of the work and feel uncomfortable. They should be made to feel responsible for their own view of the world rather than look at an artist's view and be critical of it."

But isn't the context of viewing these works in the RA just inviting the criticism - all these works have been exhibited before in less-establishment spaces with little or no attention been drawn to them?

"They're great spaces here, but I didn't want to become an academician. When they first asked me, I said no, because come the revolution people will kill you. I don't want to be establishment. I'm still hanging on to being an enfant terrible. Later, I can become an adulte terrible - that's what art's about. Secretly, though, I'm a traditionalist, you can be a traditionalist without being establishment."

If it weren't for Marcus Harvey's Myra most of the criticism in and around Sensation would have merely been re-heated arguments about Hirst's status as an "artist". With his flair for publicity and dramatic sculptures (usually some poor animal suspended in a formaldehyde solution), Hirst arouses as much hostility as adoration and is possibly the only artist ever to achieve/cultivate a pop star image. (How many artists do you know who are regularly stopped in the street and asked for their autograph?) His most famous work, Mother And Child Divided, which won him the Turner Prize in 1995, was of a cow and calf sawn in half lengthways and displayed in glass tanks; neatly merging his two major concerns, namely "death and my fondness for cutting things in half . . . that particular work was all about death, I want a glimpse of what it's like to die. I really couldn't say what I wanted to with a painting or a photograph or an object. And I like metaphor, people need to feel distanced.

"You can look at a fly or a cow and think of a person. The glass case came from a fear of everything in life being so fragile.

"I wanted to make a sculpture where the fragility was enclosed. We get put in boxes when we die because it's clean. And we get put in a box when we are born. We live in boxes." If Hirst's slice 'n' submerge approach to art was lost on traditionalists, his approach was flattered by imitation in other media - a new advertisement for Ford cars shows a sliced saloon car displayed in a Hirst-style solution.

Claiming to be a traditionalist at heart and saying his main influence remains the paintings of Francis Bacon, Hirst succeeds by dealing in universals: "You have to find triggers that everyone understands. Everyone's frightened of glass, everyone's frightened by sharks. Also, everything I do is a celebration. Art's about life, it's like medicine - it can heal. Yet I've always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don't believe in art, without questioning either."

Whatever about the concern and outrage caused by Hirst and his contemporaries at the RA, it all seems like a dress rehearsal for his new work: "I'm working on a car crash. There'll be no bodies but I want that feeling of absolute horror, just after a crash - the wheels turning, personal possessions spilling out, the radio on, the horn going. I'm using a red car, a corporation grey car and calling it Composition In Red and Corporation Grey. I'm a traditional colourist at heart!"

Sensation at Piccadilly's Royal Academy runs until December 28th. A retrospective book of Damien Hirst's work, called I Want To Spend The Rest Of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One To One, Always, Forever, Now, has just been published by Booth Clibborn Editions

Brian Fallon, chief critic, will provide a critical assessment of the exhibition in Tuesday's Arts page